The road to hell is paved with good intentions. At least that's what the proverbs say. My intention was to write several blog posts during 2017 and look how that turned out. I wrote one post outlining my intensions and then nothing.

My plan has always been that I write for myself. That is, I write about something I'm interested in or I write something down. Just in case the information might come handy at a later date. If someone else benefits from the post that's a definitive bonus.
I try to make my posts somewhat coherent and avoid substance errors. Though, grammar errors are bound to happen as english is not my first language.
I don't have a schedule or a compulsion to write.

What I'm trying to say, in my usual rambling way, is that this year I make no promises. Let see how that works out.

Just few days ago I finally published a new post, just before the New Year. But before that I had been silent over a year. Hopefully this year I'll be able to publish more than one post. This post is about my plans what to publish this year.

The past couple of years has been (mostly) good for Star Wars fans. We have gotten new movies and new perspective on the Galaxy far far away.

I have gotten absolutely nuts and geeked out over Star Wars (again). I have read all of the new canon novels. I have read more graphic novels (comics) than I have in ages. I have listened to podcasts about Star Wars and heard almost every theory the Internet has about who is Snoke and who are Rey's parents. I have played the new table-top roleplaying game, aptly named Star Wars, and the new miniatures game Armada published by Fantasy Flight Games.

I would be lying if I'd say I had done this purely for research so I could make some nice posts about the topic. But since I have invested all that time to this "hobby" I thought I might do some post based on my experiences with the books, games and the franchise in general.

In addition to Star Wars, I'm planning to make short post about specific features in various programming languages. Most likely those languages will be Swift, Go and perhaps PHP and Node (JS).

I was asked by a colleague what iOS apps I use the most and what I think are the "must haves" on an iPhone. Since I like listing things I was happy to oblige.

There are plenty of these sort of lists available and I have to say, that most are completely useless to me. We all have different needs that are defined by our lifestyle, work, friends and interests. Making a list that would satisfy all is nearly impossible. In addition, I'd like to say this is just a list of apps I feel comfortable recommending. I mention the apps but I don't review them in detail. I'd need to do a separate post if I'd wanted to do proper review.
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The Solution

In the example, we first make a HTTP GET request with Curl. Additionally, I set Curl only to accept application/json. This way my site will produce json, not html which is the default. Then I pipe the result of the request to a python's json library. This approach should work as long as you have Curl and Python installed (as is the case with OS X and most *nix systems).
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Wacom makes great drawing tablets and fun drawing tools like the Inkling. Unfortunately I have been less than impressed with their Sketch Manager application in OS X, the software that comes bundled with the Inkling pen. When I login after a restart, the Sketch Manager starts automatically. This can get annoying and it's not the way this kind of OS X application should behave.